The disclosure generally relates to mobile communications and, more particularly, to a method for reporting minimization of drive tests measurement data in mobile communications.
Nowadays, the mobile communication plays a more and more important role in people's daily life. Therefore, the network operators have invested tremendous times and money to ensure the quality and the reliability of the mobile communications. Conventionally, the network operators send engineers and measurement vehicles to the concerned areas for performing drive tests so as to collect radio measurement data, discover communication problems, etc. Not only do the conventional drive tests require high operation expenditure, but also the accuracy of the measurement data is limited by the complicated radio environment.
In the 3GPP specifications, a solution name “Minimization of Drive Tests (MDT)” is proposed to improve the problem above. The MDT utilizes the user equipments (UEs) to perform the radio measurements. The operation expenditure spent on the drive tests may be reduced and the measurement may be performed on the areas where the users actually utilize mobile communications.
Conventionally, the MDT server in the network may configure a user equipment (UE) to report the immediate MDT measurement data which are collected by the UE in the connected state (e.g., in the RRC connection mode). Besides, the MDT server may configure a UE to report the logged MDT measurement data which are collected by the UE in the idle mode.
In the current scenarios, the MDT server must configure a UE to enter the connection mode for collecting immediate MDT measure data or wait for connected UEs to report the MDT measurement data. Some UEs in the idle mode, however, may already have enough MDT measurement data but do not have a suitable chance to report. Besides, there has not been a solution for configuring multiple UEs to report the logged MDT measurement data. Therefore, the MDT server often cannot obtain the MDT measurement data efficiently.